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Alpine Linux

I recently encountered an Alpine Linux developer in the #openvz Freenode IRC channel who was working on an Alpine Linux-based LiveCD that uses the OpenVZ Legacy stable kernel and tools. If you aren't familiar with Alpine Linux (and I wasn't prior), it is a very minimal Linux distro that uses BusyBox. The LiveCD shafire (his IRC nick) created is ~ 100MB in size. Since I know OpenVZ very well, shafire asked me to lend a hand with testing.

I recorded a screencast that shows using the LiveCD from start to finish. Being very small, and needing storage space for containers, besides the LiveCD you really need a disk partition for permanent storage. The video shows booting the CD, a few manual steps that are needed to get a proper environment established, creating two containers, starting them, entering them and running some simple commands, shutting them down, and shutting down the host. I did all of the testing using a KVM virtual machine which made it easy for video capture. The video runtime is about 11 minutes and there was no editing of the video... everything is absolutely in real-time with no speedups. It is just THAT fast. :)

The embedded video is in webm/vp9 format and should play fine in contemporary versions of Firefox and Google Chrome. If you are using another browser and can't play the video, feel free to use the link under the video to download it and play with a recent version of the VLC media player. Looks like some video feeds that pick up my blog (planet.openvz.org for example) aren't embedding it properly so in that case, use the link under the video. That should work.

If you prefer to download and play in local media player, here's the direct URL:

For those interested in screencast creation and video conversion stuff, I used vokoscreen to capture my screen. It natively output a 175.9 MB .mkv file. I used ffmpeg to convert it to a webm file (vp9 video codec, no audio). The resolution is > 480p and the quality is very good... but amazingly, the filesize for the 11 minute video is only 1.7 MB. I guess ffmpeg / vp9 are awesome at comrpession of this genre of video. I set an upper limit of 200 Kbit for the video bitrate but using a variable bitrate it was able to greatly reduce the bitrate for the bulk of the video.

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LUG Meetings

Meet up with Montana Linux people on IRC. We currently gather at the #ubuntu-montana room on the freenode network. Stop in and say "hello" or even ask / answer some questions. Don't have to be a Ubuntu user either. Or use the web-based chat client.

BillingsGLUG
The BillingsGLUG hasn't had a meeting in a while but they are hoping to start back up real soon. Really.

BozemanGLUG
The BozemanGLUG usually meets on the FIRST Thursday of the month at 7PM

MSU-Bozeman
BH Building, Rm 126
Bozeman, MT

Used to be the LAST Thursday, but we changed it.

HelenaLUG
The HelenaLUG is currently on hiatus.

MissoulaLUG
The MissoulaLUG is currently on hiatus but a few individuals are working in the background to change that ASAP.

If you want to help get the BillingsLUG, HelenaLUG, or the MissoulaLUG started again, be sure to visit us in IRC.